Mizuki sighed as he sat on the bench he'd plopped down on after desultorily wandering through the village for a while after he'd reported to the Hokage, officially ending what was unequivocally the mission from Hell. The ninja he and his team had been supposed to guard the person they had been escorting from had a member in their group that had been stronger than anticipated which had bumped the mission up from a mid B to an A rank. During the battle he and his team had found themselves in, he ended up losing a teammate before the rest of the team could back the pair of them up when the team had split up to deal with the threats that had ambushed them and he and said teammate had gotten stuck with an enemy Chunin who should have been a Jounin already.
If that hadn't been bad enough, his teammate had been killed by his kunai which the enemy had caught when he'd thrown it at the man and used to stab his teammate who had been a close-range fighter. To make matters worse, when his other teammates finally arrived to provide assistance they found him practically cowering in the bushes and his teammate dead by a Konoha kunai. The looks in his other teammates' eyes at that moment had hurt more than anything.
While he was considered to be a relatively nice person and rather pleasant to be around most of the time, he had a jealous streak a mile wide, and people - other than his best friend Umino Iruka who was oblivious to his faults - knew it. One of his favorite pastimes when he was feeling bad which had developed into a habit was to make his friend Iruka - and anyone else he was jealous of for that matter - feel even worse. As well as being jealous of Iruka for all the attention he was getting from everyone including the Hokage who all wanted to give the poor orphan a hug and help him out, he had been rather jealous of the teammate of his who'd died, and his other teammates knew it.
He had limited himself to snide comments towards the man though, comments that had merely been meant to sting, comments that his other teammates had heard and had taken as something else after they had found the man dead, killed by his weapon. The entire way back to Konoha, he had heard his teammates who had suddenly become cold to him whispering behind his back, and he had a good idea as to what they were saying. After the Hokage had dismissed the team following thier report, the two of them had stayed behind, and he knew exactly what they were going to tell the old man without him around. The teammate he'd been jealous of had died by his kunai after all. The fact that it hadn't been his hand that had wielded it was immaterial at this point in the face of his teammates' suspicions.
When the Demon and his servant who had been brought back from the grave walked by carrying a folded tent on which a portable grill that ninjas used for cooking when out in the field had been set, he found that he didn't even have the energy to glare at them like he had done the few times he'd encountered them before. This apparently caused them to pause. A wary look crossed both of their faces as they tried to sort out what was wrong with their environment, and they turned to look at him upon realizing that he was the source of their unease. The Demon then dropped his end of the tent and ran up to him, stopping about two feet in front of him. It then started studying him intently as if it had never seen something like him before. The Demon's servant hung back watching him guardedly, as if trying to determine whether or not he was a threat.
"Wha's wrong?" the Demon asked, coming closer, to the point that it was almost touching him. If he didn't know any better, he would be willing to swear that the concern in its eyes was genuine.
"My teammate died!" he snapped at the creature.
An instant later, the creature launched itself at him, and before he could react, he found himself...enveloped in a hug?
Naruto hugged the gray haired man like he did Izuna-nii when he was sad. He knew that when things died, it made people sad. He'd been sad when his ninja rat had died. He and Izuna-nii had taught it to do tricks after they got it. It could roll over and beg, but it couldn't avoid traps. He hadn't got to bury it like Hiro had his rabbit. The Matron had called it a dirty creature and thrown it in the trash before he could do so.
While he hugged him, the man looked down at him and frowned. It wasn't a mean frown. It was a confused frown, like he didn't quite know what was going on, and he wasn't sure whether or not he liked it. A couple seconds later, the man pushed him off of his lap and onto the ground.
Izuna-nii never did that when he hugged him.
Oh, yeah, he wasn't supposed to hug strangers. It was one of the rules.
Mizuki wasn't sure what to think when the Demon apologized after he'd shoved it to the ground. After he'd answered its question and told it that his teammate whom he'd hated had died, the creature had hugged him, patted his head, and said "It's Okay". The look of concern on its face when it did so didn't waver for an instant. Trying to find something other than the Demon's strange behavior for his reeling mind to latch onto, he once more spotted the tent with the portable camping grill stacked on it.
"What are you two up to?" he asked, wondering what sort of nefarious plot involved a tent and a camping grill.
The Demon looked confused for a moment before looking back at his servant and brightening.
"Izuna-nii's gonna show me how to pitch a tent! Dattebayo!" the Demon yelled happily, stunning him with his abrupt mood change which proved that the earlier concern was nothing more than an act, and causing several people to look in their direction. For some strange reason, all of the shinobi who turned to look at them started snickering.
"Not if you don't hurry up -ttebane!" the Demon's servant yelled back before smacking himself on the back of the head and muttering "I have got to stop saying that."
It was at that point that one of the Uchiha walked up.
"Hey, is that my grill?" the man with the greying brown hair asked.
"Uchiha Yashiro-oyaji!" the Demon called out happily upon seeing the man.
"Hello Naruto-chan." the Uchiha said with a small smile before turning back to the Demon's servant.
"That is my grill!" the Uchiha exclaimed. "Why do you have my grill?"
"Unwritten Shinobi rule number one." the Demon's servant replied.
"Always maintain your equipment?" the Uchiha and several other shinobi asked in confusion.
"That's rule number two. What's rule number one?" the Demon's servant asked in a lecturing tone.
" 'If you can carry it off without getting caught it's yours' hasn't been rule number one for decades." the Uchiha replied as he removed the grill from where it was resting atop the folded tent. "And besides, I just caught you. You should get out of here before the Hyuuga decide to take their tent back."
"How do you know...?" the Demon's servant asked, giving the tent a significant look.
"The section of the woods that the Academy students use for survival training has cameras so the Instructors can make sure the students aren't killing each-other, and grade their progress. The video of you swiping the Hyuuga's tent became a hit overnight." the Uchiha replied.
"Come Naruto, we're leaving." the Demon's servant said before picking up his side of the tent. The Demon scrambled to obey, and the two children were off.
"Cute kids." the Uchiha said as he sat down next to him on the bench. "Troublesome, but cute. If Izuna's capable of this at this age, it almost makes me believe the family legend about the time that he and Madara had walked off with a couple of the Senju houses."
"How could you find the Demon cute?" he found himself asking.
"Because yesterday, I realized that Naruto was just a child. Had he been a demon, he would have killed all of us when he snuck into the station unnoticed, or poisoned our coffee, not tried to switch it to Decaf because it was quote The most evil thing a person could do to someone unquote." the Uchiha replied.
Despite himself, and the situation he was in, Mizuki found himself laughing. The mental image of the Kyuubi going around switching unsuspecting people's coffee to Decaf when they weren't looking was too absurd for anything else.
Omake:
A teenage Uchiha Fugaku snuck out into the woods with the old and rather dusty scroll he'd liberated from the family archives, wondering what sort of treasure or wisdom Madara had left behind for his descendants to discover. Once he reached an isolated clearing a good distance away from the village, he found that he could not contain his curiosity any longer.
When he opened the scroll, he found it to be a storage scroll whose seal was in handwriting that wasn't Uchiha Madara's. In the center of the storage seal was the character for "house". Wondering why someone would put a house in a scroll and try to pass it off as one of Madara's belongings, or if they even really had, he cut his thumb and slid it across the seal.
There was a massive puff of smoke which he'd rapidly leapt away from, and just in time too, as when the smoke cleared, the small clearing was filled with the house that had been stored in the scroll that was somewhere underneath it. Had he still been standing there like an idiot, he too would have been crushed by the domicile.
Eventually, his curiosity got the better of him, and he began exploring the exterior of the house. Besides being somewhat old-fashioned, it looked to be a rather ordinary house besides the fact that the symbol of the Senju Clan had been carved above the door. Upon entering the house, he noticed that the interior too was rather ordinary except for the subjects of the photographs that ran down the hallway that many of the rooms branched off of.
In one photograph a pair of children who would later become the Shodai and Nidaime Hokages stared solemnly out at anyone who cared to look at it. In fact, almost all of the people in the pictures that looked down at him looked rather unhappy. This probably had to do with the fact that back when the first two Hokages were children, picture taking took an exceedingly long time, and the subjects of said photographs often had to sit still for hours. By the time that that generation reached adulthood, the process had become much quicker, and smiles started appearing in photographs for pretty much the first time.
This of course begged the question of why the hell his clan had the first two Hokages' family home...
Two rather inebriated figures silently slunk through the stillness of the night avoiding the patrols in the surrounding area with ease despite their condition and the smell of alcohol that clung to them.
"This is the best idea you've ever come up with aniki." one of the figures whispered to the other before giggling.
"Do you have the scroll ready?" another the other whispered back.
"Yep -ttebane!" the first person said quietly.
The second person smacked the first person on the head.
Two minutes later, the few Senju who were still in the area while the main part of the clan was out on a difficult mission and were awake at the time stared in shock as the Clan Head's house abruptly vanished. Five seconds after that, the chase was on.
Author's Note: According to the Narutopedia article on Mizuki, when he'd initially applied to teach at the Academy, he had been denied due to suspicions about his role in the death of one of his teammates, and an investigation which presumably found him innocent was launched. It makes you wonder what something like that could do to a man, especially if the suspicions about the teammate had lingered about for years, blocking his advancement prospects and whatnot, especially if Mizuki had decided to teach at the Academy in order to gain experience for training a team when he became a Jounin, and got stuck there. I thought it would be interesting to see a reasonably nice Mizuki whose main fault was a jealous streak a mile wide who had a growing chip on his shoulder meet Naruto early.
Edited 1-21-13